GAY KNOWS AZTECS NEED THAMES ON COURT

Former San Diego State standout calls injured point guard ‘the brain of the team’

Boise St. at Aztecs

When: 8 p.m. today

Where: Viejas Arena

On the air: Time Warner Cable SportsNet/AM-600, FM-101.5

D.J. Gay played for KK Helios Domzale last season, a Slovenian professional team in a small town at the base of the Kamnik Alps. He didn’t have a microwave oven in his modest apartment, but he did have Internet and he did have an alarm clock. And on Wednesdays and Saturdays in the winter, he’d wake up at 3 a.m. to watch live web streams of San Diego State games on his laptop.

This season he’s with Andrea Costa Imola, in the Italian second division. Same deal. Wakes up at 3 a.m. for the 7 p.m. PST tipoffs from Viejas Arena.

He’s also a point guard who was the heart, soul and spirit of a team that went 34-3 and reached the Sweet 16 before losing, barely, to a UConn team that two weeks later won the NCAA Tournament. He’s on the other side of the world now, but he sees it. He gets it. He knows.

“X is kind of like the brain of the team, being the point guard,” Gay said of junior Xavier Thames, his replacement at SDSU who has missed three of the last seven games with a lower back strain. “And when you miss your brain, you know, bad things can happen.”

Gay is on a week break from Italy and will be at Viejas Arena tonight to watch his alma mater play Boise State (8 p.m., Time Warner Cable SportsNet) in the latest must-win game of an increasingly tenuous season.

Thames transferred from Washington State and sat out Gay’s senior season, soaking up every last morsel of advice from the winningest player in school history (105 victories). Gay was not a vocal leader, but he was the ultimate me-second player, understanding the game’s rhythms and nuances, guiding, prodding, pulling, pushing his team to previously unfathomable heights.

Thames has become a point guard in his image, which makes the twinge in his lower back so problematic.

“This is a very talented team that, I think, is still trying to find its identity,” Gay said after watching practice Monday. “When this team plays hard and plays together, they’re one of the best-looking teams out there. When they kind of stray from that, things can get a little iffy … X can be the difference maker because he can take control of the game, not just by scoring but knowing the pace of the game, when to run, when not to run, who to get the ball to.

“He’s a big part of this team, and they’re going to need him. Without him, they’re just going to have to continue to play hard and try to make it up in other areas.”

It remains an open question when, or even if, he’ll play again. Thames sat out live drills again this week and is officially listed as questionable.

Coach Steve Fisher scheduled a meeting Tuesday night with Thames, doctors and trainers to plot a course of action, admitting that “shutting him down for a couple weeks” is one of the options.

More optimistic was the injury report on Chase Tapley, whose sprained right wrist appears to be improving enough that he is expected to start against Boise State.

Tapley grew up with Thames in Sacramento and not having his wing man is killing him, no doubt. But he also accepts the cruel truths of their sport.

“The league is not going to stop, the games are not going to stop if a person’s out,” Tapley said. “We have to keep our heads up and keep on moving.”

Or as Fisher put it: “Nobody cares at the end, other than: Did you win? So that’s our focus.”

Fisher has a sympathetic soul in Boise State coach Leon Rice.

The Broncos were without 6-foot-2 junior guard Jeff Elorriaga for three games last month while he recovered from a concussion. Lost them all.

Elorriaga returned Saturday against UNLV. They won.

“I’ve never seen a guy that is so valuable in so many ways to his teammates,” Rice said. “He’s their emotional security blanket, I guess is what you’d call him. It’s not like he’s averaging 25 points per game and he’s an NBA player or anything like that. But he’s their emotional leader. He’s the quarterback of our team. Usually you see that in a point guard.

“When he was out, you don’t want our guys to feel like they couldn’t play without him. But it almost looked at times like we were a chicken with our heads cut off.”

“The stats only tell part of the story,” said UNLV coach Dave Rice, whose team never led in Saturday’s 77-72 loss in Boise. “There’s no doubt he gives that team a ton of confidence. And you could see that. They were a very confident group.”